Home Top 100 Nominations Comment form
Prediction and entropy of printed english.
Shannon, C. E. (1951)
Bell Systems Technical Journal, 30, 50-64.

Nominator's statement

This paper has made an important contribution in numerous ways. Here Shannon describes his unique method for determining the redundancy in printed English --- his famous guessing game. The finding that the entropy of printed literary English is on the magnitude of 1 bit per letter (corresponding to a redundancy of about 75%, is a result that is of great importance to models of language and reading. Finally, the paper serves as a fascinating (and easy-to-read if you skip over all the math parts) introduction to information theory.

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